An Incomplete List of Stupid Ways I’ve Died

I didn’t always remember the way in which I died, but sometimes I found it hard to forget.

In truth, the dignified deaths never lingered. Those, rare as they were, faded gracefully into the ether. A quiet hand-squeeze, a soft candlelit sigh, the one beautifully choreographed battlefield collapse where I actually stuck the landing. My immortal memory, in its questionable wisdom, hoarded only the absurd ones. The ones that made me hope reincarnation came with a “skip intro” option.

Over the centuries, I have:

Fallen off a roof while trying to impress someone who absolutely wasn’t looking.

Been trampled by my own horse, who was looking but chose chaos.

Choked on a ceremonial almond during my coronation.

Been eaten (partially) by a bear I mistook for a barrel.

Been crushed by a harpsichord during my performance debut (the critics loved it).

Slipped on my own cape, headbutted the ground, and been declared a war hero anyway.

Been a Monk, suffocated on incense. The gods said it “wasn’t personal,” which somehow made it worse.

I died heroically once. It wasn’t on purpose. I tripped, fell on the villain, and accidentally saved a kingdom through the power of gravity.

You’d think, after several millennia, I’d be better at it by now. A little wiser, perhaps. I was reborn wise once. The universe corrected it quickly.

Normally, reincarnation came with an amnesia wipe. Clean slate, new face, no lingering recall of the decade I spent as an argumentative deer. But lately something had gone wrong. A colour, a smell, or a sound could tear a seam in the present, and suddenly I’d be tumbling backwards into one of my own, deeply inconvenient endings.

Today, that something was purple.

Not just any purple. My purple. A particular imperial shade I’d last worn in Life Forty-Six as High Sorcerer of the Western Continent, a prestigious title I held until I was detonated by a runaway alchemical cart that had been “perfectly safe” according to a man who no longer had eyebrows.

I was walking across Nyrestelle’s city square on this particular morning, doing my best to avoid pigeons and philosophical thoughts, when I noticed a teenage apprentice trudging past in a robe of that exact purple. The fabric sagged, the hem was chewed, and the wearer looked like he’d been awake since last harvest, but the colour…

The colour punched me in the chest.

Suddenly I was there again: hot summer air, cobblestones beneath my sandals, a merchant yelling, “NOT THAT BUTTON!” moments before the cart exploded. I remembered the sickening weightlessness, the quality of the light as I soared through the sky like a disgraced comet, the cabbage that met my face with startling intimacy.

I staggered.

“Sir?” the apprentice asked politely. “Are you experiencing… something?”

“I am, but don’t take it personally.”

He nodded, the universal gesture for I have stumbled into a situation and wish to immediately depart, and scurried off.

The memory throbbed like a bruise behind my eyes. That was new. They used to be vague impressions, half-remembered sensations. Not anymore. Recently, each death had begun returning like a long-lost relative: uninvited, inconvenient, and loudly opinionated.

I needed quiet.

Old Briar Cemetery welcomed me with the soft creak of iron gates and the sigh of winter wind threading through ash trees. I made my way, as always, to Mildred Pott. Age ninety-eight. Beloved baker. Undefeated arm-wrestling champion. She’d gone in her sleep, after apparently declaring, “Right, that’ll do.” I both admired her and held a personal grudge.

I sat on the cracked stone bench beside her grave and let my head fall into my hands.

“You look dreadful,” said a voice to my left.

“Hello, Threnody,” I said without lifting my head.

Threnody drifted into view: part banshee, part librarian, all judgement delivered with love. Her shawl shifted like it was woven from overdue library fines, and her expression suggested I’d once again returned a book late.

“What triggered it?” she asked, opening a notebook titled CASE FILE: ONGOING DISASTER.

“Purple.”

“Oof. Severity?”

“Cabbage.”

She sucked air through her teeth. “Oh dear. That’s a four on the Pott Scale.”

The Pott Scale was named for Mildred, who had kindly lent her gravestone as a reference point for measuring just how badly things were going, given that she had achieved the dream of a peaceful death and therefore ranked at a smug, permanent zero. Anything involving bodily combustion or projectile vegetables ranked significantly higher.

Threnody poised her pencil. “Any other deaths resurfacing today?”

“Only most of them,” I murmured.

Her brows arched with professional delight. “Do tell.”

I sighed. “Life Fifty.”

“The harpsichord?”

“Yes.”

“I like that one,” she said brightly. “It has… musicality.”

“I died, Thren.”

“You died in three-part harmony.”

She was not wrong.

That life had been short but enthusiastic. I’d been a young woman, bright-eyed, well-trained, determined to debut in the Duke’s music hall. The gown had been too long; the shoes too ornamental; the lighting too dramatic. I’d risen for my bow, caught my heel in the hem, and toppled backwards onto the harpsichord with a noise described by one critic as “a bold exploration of the limits of sound.”

My ghost refused to haunt the venue out of humiliation.

“Anything else?” Threnody prompted gently.

“Life Twenty-Seven,” I said. “The warrior queen.”

Threnody perked up. “Oh! The one with the cape.”

“Don’t call it ‘the one with the cape’ like it’s a children’s book. It was a battle.”

“With a cape,” she said.

“It was ceremonial.”

“It was enormous.”

It had been a glorious life. I had been a woman forged of iron and audacity, leading armies, negotiating peace with storm gods, wrestling a prophecy into submission. On the final battlefield, my cape had caught on a broken spear. My feet kept going; my head did not. I fell with the dignity of a flung turnip.

From a distance, apparently, it looked heroic. They built statues. My troops dedicated songs. No one mentioned the spear.

“I achieved enlightenment once,” I muttered. “It didn’t last.”

“Mmm,” Threnody said. “Life Eleven. The incense.”

We shared a moment of silence for my past stupidity.

“Any others?”

A memory surfaced, gentler.

“Life Seven,” I whispered.

Threnody’s expression softened.

I’d been a healer then. Neither man nor woman but something quietly in between, respected, familiar, woven into the valley like thread in a loom. I remembered herbs strung from rafters, firelight on stone, children laughing as they brought me snowmelt in chipped cups. I remembered the fever that swept the valley. The hands I held until they stopped holding back. The moment I lay down on my own cot and knew, without fear, that endings were simply another kind of beginning.

That death never troubled me.

Which, unfortunately, made it the exception.

Before Threnody could prod further, the temperature dropped.

Not the natural cold of a graveyard, this was sharper, deliberate, like a blade drawn along the spine of the world.

The fog thickened. The air hummed.

“Aveline,” Threnody breathed.

The mist parted.

There she was.

Aveline Stormsinger stepped into view in full armour, every line of her sharp as cut obsidian. Her braided hair was threaded with storm-metal, and her eyes burned like someone had trapped lightning behind them.

Life Twenty-Three had been our life. Commander. Rival. Friend. Wife. Disaster. Salvation. A knot in time that neither of us ever fully untied.

“You’re…alive?” I croaked.

“In a sense,” she said. “And you’re still easily startled.”

I stared at her helplessly. She looked exactly the same. I did not. Which felt unfair.

Threnody, tactless as ever, vanished with a brief, professional nod.

Aveline approached, the frost recoiling from her boots.

“You’re remembering more,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“I disagree.”

She paused before me, studying my face with the intense focus of someone trying to find the same person inside a hundred different masks.

“When my memories returned,” she said quietly, “they came in pieces. Small, sharp pieces. A laugh. A shadow. A battlefield. And you.” Her gaze did not waver. “Always you.”

My heart clenched.

“At first,” she continued, “I remembered you only in endings. Burning. Falling. Breaking. Dying in ways you had no right to die.”

“That seems on-brand.”

“But eventually,” she said, “the other memories came.”

Her voice lowered.

“I remembered the night we argued about strategy until dusk bled into dawn. I remembered waking beside you and listening to you think far too loudly. I remembered throwing you over my shoulder because you refused to leave a burning building.”

“That happened once.”

“Three times,” she corrected coolly.

Her expression softened in a way that made my chest ache.

“You’re not the sum of your deaths,” she said. “You’re the sum of everything between them.”

I looked at her, the weight of centuries pressing in.

“What do I do?” I whispered.

“Stop running,” she said simply. “Let them be stories, not weapons.”

“Is that advice or a threat?”

“Yes.”

I laughed shakily.

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

She stepped close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from her armour.

“Yes,” she murmured. “You never get rid of me for long.”

Then she dissolved, caught in a whirl of golden dust, and the graveyard exhaled in her absence.

Threnody reappeared. “I’m adding ‘disturbances in the veil’ to your file,” she said.

“Please don’t.”

“Too late.”

I left before she could turn it into homework.

Nyrestelle glowed with lantern light as evening settled in, narrow streets alight with gold, crooked towers leaning conspiratorially together, gargoyles peering down like disgruntled rent collectors.

I walked slowly, steadying my breath.

For the first time in centuries, the memories felt… connected. Not random explosions of humiliation, but fragments of a shape I was finally noticing. A vast, complicated tapestry made of healer tenderness, warrior rage, monk serenity, musician dreams, and the persistent tendency to die in ways that would embarrass a potato.

Aveline’s words echoed softly:

You’re not the sum of your deaths.

I turned down Wraithbone Lane, the street warm from the day’s sun.

Ten steps later, the universe decided it had indulged my personal growth long enough.

There was a whirring.

A clatter.

A dangerously cheerful jingle.

I turned.

A delivery golem, wheels sparking, arms overloaded with boxes marked AMBROSIA PASTRIES – TASTE THE DIVINE— hurtled toward me with all the grace of a drunken dragon.

“Oh,” I said.

“Not again.”

It hit me with the force of prophetic inevitability.

Flight.

A burst of powdered sugar.

A tart to the face.

A distinctly undignified yelp that I sincerely hope was not mine.

Then darkness welcomed me like an old friend who’d given up on offering advice.

Weightlessness.

Quiet.

A familiar voice, my own but new, sighed into the void:

Really? Already?

“Apparently,” I murmured.

Memories rose, gentle now, cohesive. The healer. The queen. The monk. The musician.The dozens more. All the ways I had lived before I had died. All the ways I had tried.

I’m the only person I know who has died from both overconfidence and underconfidence. Possibly in the same week.

Aveline’s voice echoed through the void:

Stories, not wounds.

Warmth surged. Reincarnation gathered like a tide.

And as the new life unfurled around me like a familiar cloak, one last thought surfaced, inevitable, patient, and faintly amused.

I didn’t always remember the way in which I died, but sometimes I found it hard to forget.